2020Dad - I see that this article really rubbed you the wrong way. I'm struggling a little bit to see why because I agree with much of what you wrote, but I also very much agree with much of what the Stanford Dean says.
A few years ago I had an employee in my office, madder than he!! because we weren't going to hire his daughter for an internship. One of the supervisors under me said he would, I said no. His daughter was a communications major, we are a national research lab. It wasn't a good fit and besides, I didn't think it was the best idea to hire kids directly into their parents organization.
What did he do next? Went to the lawyers. Does that sound right to you? To me, this is the ultimate 'helicopter parent.'
But now the response gets fuzzy - the lawyers told me that while we couldn't do him a 'favor' by hiring his daughter, we also couldn't eliminate her. So I went back to the employees supervisor (also a good friend of his) and said, 'look me in the eye and tell me you're not doing him a favor.' The supervisor basically lied and said, 'no, absolutely not.'
So I let him hire her to do 'communications' for one of our labs. By the end of the summer, she was tied for THE WORST intern we'd ever had. She embarrassed her father (although I don't know if he ever figured that out) because many of his colleagues were talking about it without him in the room. He effectively humiliated his daughter and I'm not the only one who saw it that way.
But note that I said "tied for the worst." Who did she tie with? Yeah, you guessed it, the daughter of one of the lead HR managers at our lab who successfully pressured my boss to pressure us to take her. Total waste. She began her end of summer presentation with, "What did I learn on my summer internship - that I'd never want to be an engineer."
#Awesome!! 
So here's my thought - we're all helicopter parents to some degree and OF COURSE we should help our kids achieve dreams. Point out the pathway, be a mentor and provide the venue within our means. But how far are you willing to go? - and I think thats what the Dean is asking us to ask ourselves. And I especially like her advice that there are plenty of good schools not named Stanford or Harvard. I went to a gigantic State U. that you wouldn't list in hardly anyone's top 100 schools and got a great education and have been very successful - probably beyond my dreams - and I got to go to Stanford for grad school to boot!
I do feel that I became a better parent with better long term results when I began to let my 6 kids make mistakes, pick themselves up and figure out how to solve it themselves and move forward. It has been tough a few times (really tough!), but I really like what we're getting on the other end of that in terms of how our kids are doing as young adults. This is what I think the main message is by the Dean.